Insatiable: Porn — a Love Story (16 page)

“Come in!” Kevin yelled.

I walked back into his room and found him standing, facing the door, the sheet of his bed draped on him, covering him head to toe like a ghost. It was a blue sheet, patterned with tons of little cowboys riding horses.

“What are you doing?” I giggled.

“Don’t you notice anything?” Kevin muffled from under the sheet, laughing.

I looked down and realized he had cut a slit in the fabric, and his dick was hanging out, hard. I hadn’t noticed, because of the busy pattern. Shaking with laughter, I walked toward him.

“Blow me.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I want you to blow me.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “Are you fucking serious?”

“Yah.”

So I got on all fours on the bed and blew.

The next day, when we snuck out of school again to go to his apartment, we sat on his bed to realize his stepmom had sewn the hole shut.

I was Kevin’s first girlfriend. I took his virginity, but his friends didn’t know that. He was about the tenth guy I had slept with, but it was with him that I really explored my sexuality for the first time. As teenagers in New York City, we had to be creative; most New York apartments are small and not ideal for sex while parents are home. We’d go to the stairwell, the roof, even the elevator to fuck. We’d skip school and take the train for an hour and a half to his dad’s country house upstate just so we could smoke weed and fuck all day. I wasn’t allowed to sleep over at his apartment, but a few nights a week he’d sneak me in after everyone was asleep. We’d have silent sex, and I’d pee in Gatorade bottles throughout the night.

A year before his death, Dee called me in a panic. “Remember Rosie?”

Of course I remembered Rosie. Kevin hung out with her a few times when we had taken a monthlong break from our relationship in my senior year. He swore up and down all they did was kiss, once at the pizza place.

“She
blew
him. He just told me not to tell you but how can I not?”

It had been almost ten years since we were together.

“What? Are you fucking joking right now? Tell me everything.”

“He went out to get Phillies so I have to be quick. Remember he told us about the pizza place, how they kissed? Well, apparently they came back here and she fucking blew him! Asa, I’m so mad at him I can’t even look at his face. But he made me promise not to tell you.”

“That motherfucker! And that stupid bitch! I’m gonna scream!”

“That’s what I said! But you can’t tell him you know or he’ll kill me.”

“I’m not gonna say anything. I don’t even care. I think. I don’t know. That stupid cunt. Just be mean to him today for me.”

“Um, duh. He’s going to be paying for this for a long time.”

I always thought a day would come where I could confront him about Rosie. And we’d have a laugh about it.

I didn’t go to the funeral. I bought a ticket to fly into the city, but the morning of the flight I stayed in bed. A part of me felt he wouldn’t want me there. We hadn’t gotten along for the past few years. He had started dating Dee two years prior, so we’d see each other often, but only communicated when necessary. He resented me for doing porn. He resented me even before that, when I was stripping.

“I’ve never hated anyone as much as I hate you,” he told me in one of the last phone conversations we had.

I lay in bed, watching the time pass by as I missed the flight, and reminisced about one winter evening in my junior year of highschool. My part-time job at the children’s bookstore was okay, but I needed more cash to buy things like weed and purses. At least, that’s what I told Kevin. He saw right through me.

“How do you not have enough money? Your parents give you an allowance and I pay for everything anyway.”

“I don’t
want
you to pay for everything! And my allowance is fucking twenty dollars a day; that’s barely enough to
eat!
How can you not get it??” I turned around in the swivel chair and pouted. Pushing against his desk with my hand, I started to spin around and around in circles. I would get my way.

For as long as I can remember, I always felt like I didn’t have enough money. Throughout my childhood, my parents had been rich and poor many times. They always sent me to an elite private school, but I was never as rich as the other kids in school. There were years we lived in expensive doorman buildings in SoHo and West Village, but there were also years we lived above a bodega in Brooklyn off a stop on the G train. At nineteen, during the height of my family’s brokeness, I married a sports bookie who offered me five thousand dollars a month as an allowance, just for spending; my food, mortgage, and expenses would already be covered. I felt mortified that someone could think I could enjoy life on that little. In the end I got a ten-thousand-dollar allowance.

My views on money have always been confused.

“Asa, that job sounds shady as fuck. I’m sorry I don’t want my girlfriend giving random motherfuckers handjobs!”

I had been strolling Craigslist for days. That’s what “looking for a job” meant to me; sitting at my boyfriend’s computer in my pajamas at 7 p.m., smoking a blunt, watching
The Simpsons
, and periodically hitting the “refresh” button on Craigslist.

The ad read:

Massage therapist needed. No experience necessary, will train. Make your own schedule! Make up to 600 dollars a day call two one two five zero five nine two seven five.

I knew exactly what this job was about. I convinced myself that I didn’t. I played dumb with Kevin. I brought the spinning chair to a halt.

“I would never fucking do that, you know that! Why would you even go there? Just let me check it out. It’s a legitimate massage therapy job. Maybe this is what I want to do after I graduate.”

Eventually I persuaded Kevin to come with me to the job interview. He was mad, but I knew he’d get over it. This wasn’t the first time I demanded to do something he disagreed with. Just a few months ago, I met a man in the subway who offered me a gig as an “import model.” You know, the girls who stand in bikinis next to cars at trade shows. The man knew I was young, but once I told him I had a fake ID, he assured me “that should work just fine.” When I got to the initial photo shoot, it was at the man’s apartment in the projects. I did two sets of photos, one in a bikini, one in a dress, all while hoping the whole time I wouldn’t get raped. After I left, I never picked up the man’s calls again.

Once we got to the midtown address given to me over the phone, Kevin waited outside. Although the building was beautiful, it was definitely residential, which didn’t support my case of “This is a legitimate massage therapy job.” I could see Kevin grilling me down through the glass door of the lobby as I walked into the elevator. I pretended not to notice.

Upstairs, a man in a silky black robe opened the door. He was some kind of dark Asian—Thai, Filipino, something like that. He was probably in his mid-forties. Immediately, I got creeped out.

“Welcome,” he said, as he smiled and extended his hand. I took it. It was eerily soft.

“Hi.” I looked around, and everything was either gold or mirrored. There was a flute hanging from a random corner in the ceiling, the significance of which I immediately grasped; a few years back, my mother had flown in a woman from Thailand to redecorate our entire house according to the laws of fen shui. We had flutes, tiny mirrors, fish, dragons, strategically hanging all over our walls. It’s still embarrassing to explain when I take someone back home:
Oh, the trashcan is awkwardly right smack in the middle of the kitchen because obviously, the way they built this place, any of the corners, or against a wall would be bad luck. And try not to knock over the cups of salt inconveniently placed throughout the house. Don’t mind the sheet we put over the mirror in the bedroom when we go to sleep, either, but it’s inauspicious to go to bed facing a mirror
.

The man introduced himself as Bill.

“Totally not his name,” I thought as I followed him inside. The rest of the apartment was just as mirrored and gold as the entrance. He showed me the office, explaining, “She’s not here right now, but Mia takes all the bookings,” and the “massage room,” which was a bedroom with a massage table and some candles.

“So, how open are you?” he somewhat discreetly asked.

“Pretty open.” I smiled.

“When can you start training?” He smiled back.

“Whenever. I go to school during the day, but I can always skip.”

“That’s okay, most of our clients like to book in the evening. You charge them two hundred fifty dollars. A hundred goes to us, one-fifty to you. How far you want to go is up to you, but they do expect a release, if you know what I mean. Do you want to train tonight?”

“Sure.” I thought of Kevin downstairs, but how long could training take, anyway? He could wait. I’d rather beg for forgiveness later than go downstairs now to tell him I was gonna be another hour.

Bill started to untie his robe.

“Wait!” I blurted out. “You mean—with you?” Surely this man wasn’t going to make me train on
him
.

“Yes,” Bill calmly answered. “I can show you some basic massage techniques you may not know.”

Everything became too real in one second. In my mind, I would be “massaging” hot businessmen—not sleazy Filipino guys named “Bill” with soft hands who wore silk robes and lived in gold apartments. I didn’t wanna see this guy’s penis, much less touch it.

“Actually, my boyfriend is downstairs waiting for me. Maybe I should come back some other time,” I backpedaled.

“It won’t take long,” Bill said, smiling calmly. “You can even tell him to wait up here if you want.”

“It’s okay, I’d really just rather come back without him.” Maybe I meant it, maybe I was lying. I would decide later.

I left the apartment and rode down the elevator as I thought of what to say to Kevin. Did this man even run a business at all? If I had “massaged” him, would that be it? Was he the only “client”?

Kevin was still mad, smoking a cigarette when I approached him.

“Well?” he asked.

“I got the job. It’s legit. I’m gonna think about it.” I casually said as I walked toward the subway station.

We didn’t say a word all the way back to his house. He made me a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, my favorite, and he never brought it up again.

In some ways, I think Kevin knew me better than anyone. But maybe that’s just the kind of thing you can only say once someone’s passed.

14
(and a half)
Dee

“If I were a stripper, my name would be Candy.” I had been thinking about it for a while.

“Mine would be Crystal.” Dee apparently had been, too. “We’re so old . . . you know we are almost sixteen? Next thing you know, we’ll be thirty.” This was a conversation familiar to both of us.

I would go on to strip one day, but Dee took another route completely: law school. Eventually she’d drop out and move to Brazil, but she did go.

Sitting on our favorite stoop in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, we were passing a blunt back and forth. This is what we did with most of our time—smoke blunts. I loved weed, but I only smoked socially, when I was with my friends. Eventually, after years of being too high to get up to look for the remote control, I realized I actually liked being sober better. In five years, I’d go on to quit smoking altogether. Not Dee. For her, everything was better with weed. She woke up in the morning and smoked a blunt walking to the subway station on her way to school. She smoked blunts in between classes. She smoked blunts after school, and smoked blunts on her evening dog walk before bed. To this day, she doesn’t do anything unless it consists of a pregame blunt before, and a celebratory blunt after. Blunt in between preferred.

By definition, we were potheads. But that didn’t mean we didn’t do other things, too. Acid, Ecstasy, angel dust, my mom’s Ambien—thankfully, we never liked coke. We partook in recreational drugs almost every weekend. In particular, we loved Special K—ketamine, K, liqs, animal tranquilizer. We’d buy bottles whenever we could afford to, cook the liquid up into a powder, and scrape it up and into our noses. We loved to snort it lying in my bed together, staring at a certain hole in my bedroom wall—as the high spread throughout our bodies, the hole would get farther and farther away.

Dee is my best friend in the universe. We haven’t lived in the same country for over seven years now, but it doesn’t affect her place in my life. I knew her before either of us had ever even smoked a cigarette for the first time. We were thirteen, and although we were in different classes, we took after-school music together because we were both failing. We were the only ones in the class. It turned out we got along, and soon we’d skip the class and go eat pizza together after school instead. We liked the same kinds of boys, music, and TV shows. We were both only children. We both moved to the United States a couple of years ago, and we both were middle-class kids on scholarship, living among trust fund babies. We lived close to each other—her in the Lower East Side, me in SoHo—so we’d take the same bus home in the evening.